Tell foreign rivals that the Government is pursuing growth and they’ll laugh
in your face.

In his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond asks a question pertinent to Britain’s business community today: are we Norse or are we Inuit? When the Norse settlers arrived in Greenland, they refused to recognise that the climate was changing. They continued to hunt and cook in ways that seemed perfectly adapted to their landscape. As the environment changed, the settlers didn’t: as pasture dwindled, instead of using fish as a source of food, they continued to rely solely on livestock, which the new landscape couldn’t support. The result was slow oblivion, as the Norse starved to death.

The same changes were being visited on the Inuits. But they continued to eat fish and they changed some of their traditional farming practices to meet the new conditions. They thrived and prospered.

So will Britain starve or prosper? We are currently facing a world in which the centre of gravity is moving from West to East. Half of all humanity now lives east of the Middle East. One in three people in the world lives in China or India. This is where the growth is, because this is where the young people are.

As our competitors move rapidly, what are we doing about growth? The Government has endless policy reviews and consultation frameworks: there is the Strategy for Sustainable Growth; the Path to Strong Sustainable and Balanced Growth; and the Plan for Growth. It seems we are extremely good at growing plans, but not growth. Today’s Budget needs to change that.

I was in China last week, and business leaders laughed when I told them the UK Government was pursuing a “balanced agenda for growth”. They see a country that makes it almost impossible to do business. It is difficult and expensive to get visas; there are very few air links; and taxes are too high. They told me we would be better pursuing unbalanced growth over a balanced recession.

The UK ought to be an ideal place to do business. We are an open, trading economy with a flexible labour market. We have the ideal geographical position, perfectly located between times zones. We speak the global language of business. Our legal system, which defines and binds contracts, is respected the world over. We have more top-ranking universities than any country except the US. We have a fine heritage as an enterprising nation. The great wave of globalisation that we are living through should be tailor-made for us. Yet it doesn’t feel like that at the moment.

According to the World Economic Forum’s latest Global Competitiveness Report, the UK has moved back into the top 10 for the first time since 2007. We’re in tenth place. If you put this in football terms, we would be mid-table. Is this the limit of our ambition, where avoiding relegation is seen as success?

At our best, we had the third-lowest corporate tax in the EU-15. Now we are eighth. Manufacturing has halved as a share of our economy, and 50 per cent of all manufacturing jobs have been lost. Germany spends almost half as much again as we do on research and development. In the final three months of last year, business investment fell by 5.6 per cent. It’s little wonder we have such poor growth, when we do so little to make it happen.

Aviation has always been critical to the growth and success of the UK economy: it connects our small trading nation to the world. In 2006, however, Gordon Brown brought that growth to a standstill when he doubled the rate of air passenger duty (APD). This time last year, George Osborne may have said “Let it be heard around the world... Britain is open for business”, but he didn’t say how much it would cost you to engage. Flying from Shanghai on business, you are now taxed £162, from Buenos Aires, £184, and from Sao Paulo, £162. APD is a big “No Entry” sign hung around the UK’s neck. It is having the same effect on tourists. There were three million Chinese visitors to Europe last year, but only 150,000 of them came to the UK. They won’t pay over the odds to come here and it is arrogant of us to think that they will.

The stark fact is that while passengers are growing in Europe, UK numbers last year were the same as in 2004; and today the industry is facing a double inflation hike in APD, with further rises planned in the coming years. Inbound tourism is a major employer of young people, but international visitors are being turned off the UK because of the exorbitant level of APD. Why is the Treasury afraid to do a study into the effect this tax is having on our wider economy?

This week, at least, David Cameron finally conceded that we need better links to emerging economies. The case for more air capacity in the South East is compelling, and the Prime Minister is right to try to inject some urgency into the debate. There are already 21 emerging market destinations that are served from other European hubs but not from the UK. We only connect to three cities in China from Heathrow, and the sorry truth is that if a business is interested in trading with Guangzhou or Shenyang, it is better off starting out from Frankfurt than London. We are falling behind in developing air routes to Asia, to Latin America and to all the regions in the world that will power our growth in the future.

Heathrow is currently the number one international airport in the world. (We are not number one at many things any more.) But Heathrow is full. Ten years ago Dubai airport was 99th in the world. It was 13th in 2010 and last year it was fourth for international passenger numbers. In a couple of years it will have overtaken Heathrow.

The Thames Estuary hub isn’t the answer. Credit to the Mayor of London, though: at least he’s thinking big; at least he’s getting the question discussed. But this is an idea whose time never seems to come. It’s been talked about, on and off, for four decades. In that time, nobody has ever really offered any convincing answers about how the operational, financial and surface transport challenges would be overcome.

A new airport will be almost impossible to finance and could never work if Heathrow were to remain open. And if you force the closure of Heathrow, how would the economy of west London and the Thames Valley cope? Some 76,000 jobs are dependent on the airport and hundreds of thousands more indirectly. In Germany, meanwhile, Frankfurt has added a fourth runway and in Italy there are plans to expand Rome airport. China will build well over 50 new airports during this decade and Hong Kong has given the go ahead for a third runway. In Britain, we’ll be lucky if we ever finish consulting on building one.

I’m not asking for special treatment or protection. The open economy has brought us the most prosperous era in human history. But I am asking for some clarity about where and how this country will earn its living in the future. Nobody expects the Government to do all the heavy lifting. But the sector in which I work shows that, although political leadership cannot create economic opportunity, the absence of political leadership can certainly prevent it. Will we be starved? Or will we be allowed to prosper?

Willie Walsh is CEO of International Airlines Group, the parent company of BA and Iberia, and president of London Chamber of Commerce